Thoughts on Getting Angry

I choose not to waste my life being angry.

This morning I – with several thousand of my closest friends – got an e-mail from 350.org telling me that it was time for me get angry and support a federal investigation into what Exxon leadership knew about climate change and when did they know it.

It told me that it was time to get angry that I had been lied to. Bill McKibben goes on to say that we shouldn’t just be cynical and say ‘of course they knew;’ that if they’d only told the truth we’d all be green by now. Seriously? We had no idea that 7 billion people raising billions of animals for food and burning carbon-based fuels while denuding the surface of oxygen-producing vegetation was a loser? I’m reminded of when the world found out that smoking was a danger to our health.

I’m not clear on when this whole “what did they know and when did they know it” mantra came into fashion; I feel like the Democrats started it when they were investigating the Watergate break-in but I could be wrong. I’m not opposed to investigating crime, but spending millions just to find out how pissed-off I should be seems like good money being thrown after bad.

Now it’s “get Hillary” time in Congress. After all of the lives lost and fortunes spent during Republican administrations in the past, we have yet another investigation into what Hillary might have known before four people were killed at Benghazi.

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Of course Exxon executives knew they were managing a finite resource that was polluting, but there was still oil to be sold and a lot of money in it, and they were going to get it and sell it. Of course tobacco executives knew then and know today that their product, in it’s purest form, is poison and that it is addictive, but people are still buying it and there’s a lot of money in it and they’re going to get it to market. Investigating Exxon for years and then holding years of hearing on what they knew and when they knew it – assuming either Republican-controlled chamber would undertake such a thing – would accomplish nothing.

My great-uncle farmed with horses up to his retirement in the 50s because internal combustion engine exhaust would kill his crops.  My foster-father told me when I was 12 not to smoke because it was killing him. They knew, and we knew, and we let it get like this anyway. Investigate that.

No. A few of you people are evil, some of you are nuts, and a bunch of you are in denial, but I’m 68 years old and I refuse to spend whatever time I have left in this body angry. If I was going to get angry then I’d have to move, and if I moved again I might have to leave the country and I paid for this country. I’m okay with being cynical – cynical and disappointed – but I’m not going to be angry.

“Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time, and it annoys the pig.”
– Robert A. Heinlien, 1973, Time Enough for Love